Mad Radioactive Mutant

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

A fascinating video report on Khikhus and company's wonderful RESPEKT project -- precisely the sort of komiks that will change minds about such things as racial/ethnic intolerance in Russia, but also, one hopes, about komiks themselves!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Afisha just came out with a great round-up of Russian comics publishers - eight in all!:http://www.afisha.ru/article/9841/ .

As for me, I'm hard at work writing on Elena Voronovich and Andrei "Drew" Tkalenko's graphic novel Sterva (based on concepts originated by the Strugatsky Bros.) for a collection of essays on adaptations of Russian classics. Enjoying the start of my sabbatical!

Friday, June 24, 2011

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Slavic Review, the membership journal of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and a leading publication in my field, has just published Karen Ryan's (University of Virginia) review of my book in their new issue (Vol. 70 No. 1, Spring 2011).

All in all Ryan gives me a thumbs up, with some minor complaints which I've heard from other reviewers. Some highlights:

Following the cultural turn recently taken in Slavic studies, José Alaniz makes a case thatRussian comics (komiks) should be regarded as a serious art form with a respectable provenance.His book is the first major English-language study of komiks; it will be of interest,not only to students and scholars of Russian culture, but also to comics aficionados in thetransnational sphere.

Alaniz’s accounts of the exhibitions, installations, and performances of ZhoraLitichevskii and Gosha Ostretsov, members of the ArtKomiks movement, are fresh andperceptive; he writes with the enthusiasm of an active participant, which gives his scholarlyprose an unusually vivid quality.

A fascinating case study—both aesthetically and socioculturally—isthat of Nikolai Maslov, who published his autobiography in the form of comics in France.The scandal that swirled around Siberia exposes the petty jealousies and factionalism thathave riven the comics industry in Russia.

This volume includes many illustrations of komiks, most black-and-white but somereproduced in color in an attractive eight-page insert. Alas, almost all of the illustrationsare small, making it difficult to read the interpolated text and to see visual details. Quitelikely, producing larger reproductions of examples was prohibitively expensive; this criticalstudy thus suffers from the same sort of financial limitations that have hindered thedevelopment of the komiks industry in Russia.

Although the author’s tone is usually neutral, he is clearly a devotee of and an advocate for komiks.Those who do not share his enthusiasmsuffer from “comicsophobia” and persist in regarding comics as “disposable, contemptible,possibly dangerous, ‘foreign’ trash” (112). I suspect that many Russians are less passionateabout comics than he implies; Alaniz interprets indifference as hostility, and his slightlydidactic tone can be off-putting. He prescribes a change of attitude; the stated goal ofhis study is “to demonstrate that Russians might do better simply to accept, appreciate,and enjoy komiks as a wayward part of their artistic patrimony, and welcome them home”(141). Unfortunately, with a couple of notable exceptions (such as Maslov’s work), theexamples explicated in this book do not persuade us that the effort would be repaid atthis moment in time.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Looking back on 2010,I think the year just past will go down as a landmark for Russian comics, comparable to 1956 (the debut of Ivan Semenov’s seminal journal Merry Pictures), 1988 (the founding of KOM, the first Russian comics studio), 1999 (the establishment of Andrei Ayoshin’s indispensable website Komiksolet, which brought the scene out of its 1990s funk) and 2002 (the first KomMissia festival).

2010 saw some major (we might say “earth-shaking”) komiks-related events, which in aggregate make it quite significant. Among these I would include the following.

At the 2010 KomMissia, Vladimir Morozov, director of Zangavar Press, presented the first volume of his large-format, lavishly-produced collection of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (a translation of Sunday Press’ 2006 So Many Splendid Sundays book), though its price keeps it out of reach for most Russian consumers. When I asked Morozov about this at the festival, he responded only that he considered the Russian market ready for his products, adding that he’s also at work on a translated Krazy Kat collection. This is good news, despite the price tag, because the Russian scene (artists, publishers, scholars, fans) have up 'til now had a dearth of translations of world classics, especially the older ones -- to say nothing of publishers willing to put out examples of their own classics. In other words, they have been working without a strong sense of comics' global history. Projects like Zangavar's are starting to change that.

As for contemporary classics, Dmitry Yakovlev’s Boomkniga Press in St. Petersburg published the collected Russian edition of Elena Voronovich and Andrei “Drew” Tkalenko’sThe Bitch (Стерва), the most important graphic novel of the last ten years. This addresses a long-standing problem in the Russian comics non-market, whereby worthy longer-form works like this appear only in scattered fragments in festival catalogs or online, making it more difficult to appreciate them as coherent wholes. In The Bitch’s case, it had already appeared in Polish translation in 2009! We still await a Russian edition of Nikolai Maslov’s work, which has already appeared in English, Italian, French and Spanish translation – though at least Maslov got some deserved star treatment in 2009 from Sasha Kunin’s online journal Khroniki Chedrika (http://chedrik.ru/up2/content/view/89/18/).

In December, the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val unveiled “Merry Pictures: The First Russian Comics,” curated by Nina Divova; an exhibit devoted to this topic (here, on the occasion of the 55thanniversary of Semenov’s journal) on such a scale and in such a major Moscow museum, makes me liken the import of this show to that of“Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” at the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décorifs in 1967 (an event once mocked by the Soviet press as evidence of Western cultural decadence).

Another first: the respected press Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie released an anthology of critical articles, Russky komiks, edited by Yu. Alexandrov and A. Barzakh. A 1998 exhibit, “Comics in Russia” at St. Petersburg’s Borei Gallery, served as the impetus for the collection, so it took a while to get out. But this publication represents a consequential step towards academic acceptance of comics studies in Russia. Stay tuned for my review.

I humbly put forward my own book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (the first book-length study of the subject in any language, which came out in February) as another milestone.

Finally, possibly the most influential and widely-publicized event (and in any case the most mind-blowing), no less a personage than President Dmitry Medvedev noted in a mid-December speech at a conference on technology and modernization of the economy: “All too often, those seeking information encounter some rather dull websites … The idea of comics in this context appeals to me.”

Of course, the president went on to say, “I’m not sure, though, that I will turn my own site into a comics site. This would probably not be very proper.” The Russian press ridiculed the comments anyway, but you never know: in the current political climate, these sorts of pronouncements tend to make things happen. Could 2011 bring forth the long-awaited, full-fledged acceptance of komiks in the mainstream, albeit by government fiat?

Friday, December 31, 2010

To ring out 2010, here you have some covers from the mid-1990s Ekaterinburg anthology series "Veles," which in the book I note as the first publication of the popular contemporary artist Konstantin Komardin – and which I mistakenly described as "cancelled after one issue." As you can see here, it went through at least seven.